1.8.5-Aphraseremains
Brick!Club 1.8.5 A fitting grave Valjean is arrested, and so almost the entire town turns on him instantly, with no regard for the enormous positive effects he’s had. The gossips from when he first came to M.-sur-M. all get to feel validated in their earlier feeling that “he was too good to be true” and subsequent malicious speculation. What’s with the “That’ll teach the Bonapartists!”? I’m inclined to assume it goes with the bit a few chapters ago about Valjean referring to Napoleon as ‘Emperor’, and so turning the royalist judge against him, but I don’t understand what the connection is. Is this old lady just saying that he’s a Bonapartist? (Which would explain him calling him the emperor, at least.) Or is there some connection I’m unaware of between Napoleon and convicts/the prison system? But “three or four” people in the town don’t immediately abandon their good opinion of him the moment they hear the word ‘convict’. The concierge, Sister Simplice… Sister Perpetua, do you think? She doesn’t much seem like the kind of person who would assume the best of him when everyone else is assuming the worst, but who knows, we’re not given enough information to guess. And Valjean escapes from the jail incredibly easily, presumably because of his superpowers. Though even Hugo can’t explain how he got into the courtyard, and just goes ‘oh well, handwave it, I’m pretending to be writing a historical account based off of sources, I’ve used the records are unclear excuse before and I’ll use it again, “the point has never been cleared up”, deal with it.’ Valjean is extremely concerned with making sure they find the money he stole from Petit-Gervais. And with keeping the candlesticks. Now that he’s made his confession, he’s embracing the symbols of his identity as Jean Valjean which he earlier tried to destroy, even the thorn cudgel. They’ve been fished out of the fire (by one of the few people who stills believes in him). “The emotions of the day had turned the nun again into a woman.” Um. Because she’s weeping and getting upset, and so becoming more of a person than an angelic ideal again? Sister Simplice is pretty great. The moment where she just flat out lies to Javert twice is excellent. She has a moral framework in which she operates where lying is an evil (but apparently lies of omission are okay), but, unlike Javert, she can see where she has to modify her behaviour and break her rules in order to do the actually moral thing. And Javert believes her, because he believes absolutely in her honesty, particularly because she is a nun and so is right up there in his hierarchy of authority, and admires her for her principles, and he can’t see how those principles might need to bend for the sake of doing the right thing or imagine her doing so. But Hugo is very clear that her lie is good, saying that he hopes that in Heaven she will be credited for her falsehood. Hugo introduces Sister Simplice and her honesty as an absolute: “the lie is the absolute evil. There can be no small lie; who lies, lies wholly. The lie is the devil’s own face.” This already doesn’t quite jive with the moral framework of the novel as it’s been presented up to that point – just for starters, the Bishop saved Valjean by lying for him and that was clearly a good move – but it is presented as absolute fact. And then he complicates it, because being inflexible causes problems and there are circumstances in which your moral principles may contradict the truly moral action in that case. And Sister Simplice is not tarnished by her lie, she did not do an evil thing in the service of good: the lie itself was good, “an act of sacrifice” which Heaven ought to credit her for. I’m not sure if I should connect this to the fact that she has been ‘turned back into a woman’ by her emotional upheaval – the situation has made her less absolute and so she is able to lie? And the curé decides that he can be lax about following Valjean’s request regarding Fantine’s burial because, after all, he’s only a criminal and she was only a prostitute. And so she’s buried in a public grave “resembling her own bed.” Society’s judgment forced her into prostitution, and now that she’s dead that same judgment forces her to share her grave as she did her bed. Valjean condemned her accidentally before with his misguided and judgmental morality clause and now his well-meaning attempt to help after her death by, well, throwing money at things, as is his wont, is equally unhelpful, though that’s rather less his fault. Commentary Columbina I thought the anti-Bonapartist lady was meant to be like those people who respond to youth violence by being all “It’s all that darn rap music and video games! Didn’t have this sort of nonsense in MY day!” but with Napoleon instead of pop culture. Which is why we get the little snarky comment about the “depth” of the remark, that she was turning this individual incident (which the reader knows has nothing to do with Napoleon) into proof of a greater societal trend (that she wants to see proved)? That’s awkwardly worded but that’s what I get for trying to reply while in line at the supermarket. Pilferingapples (reply to Columbina) *snorts* "These kids and their Emperor-hop! Why back in MY day we had aristocracy and we liked it! Well all right we didn’t, there was a war about it, but the point is I was young and people respected their elders and why won’t those kids get off my lawn, the way they laugh is going to confuse some dying woman and cause all sorts of metaphors and I don’t like it!" Viventlespeuples I kinda got the implication that word had got around about Valjean saying emperor rather than Buonaparte. If it offended the judge that deeply, other people surely would have taken notice and gossiped about it. Maybe she read about it in that legitimist newspaper she reads? Or was that just Hugo trying to be poetic about telling us she’s a royalist and the paper itself is irrelevant? As for Simplice, I don’t think she’s becoming more of a person here. If we look back a few chapters we see she was already a person when she wasn’t a woman. She was a person—we don’t dare use the word woman—who was calm, austere, good company yet detached, and who had never told a lie. From this I can only surmise that, if anything, she’s becoming less of a person when she turns into a woman. Ohhh, Hugo.